College News

Author Joanne Harris was the speaker at Catawba College's 22nd annual Brady Author's Symposium held April 24th in the Robertson College-Community Center on campus.

Joanne Harris was born in Barnsley in 1964, the daughter of a French mother and an English father. She studied Modern and Mediaeval Languages at St Catharine's College, Cambridge and was a teacher for 15 years, during which time she published three novels; The Evil Seed (1989), Sleep, Pale Sister (1993) and Chocolat (1999), which was made into an Oscar-nominated film starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp. Since then, she has written six more novels; Blackberry Wine, Five Quarters of the Orange, Coastliners, Holy Fools, Gentlemen and Players, and most recently, The Girl With No Shadow, plus; Jigs & Reels, a collection of short stories, and, with cookery writer Fran Warde, two cookbooks: The French Kitchen and The French Market. Her books are now published in over 40 countries and have won a number of British and international awards. Harris plays bass guitar in a band first formed when she was 16, is currently studying Old Norse, and lives with her husband Kevin and her daughter Anouchka, about 15 miles from the place she was born.